30K for Housewives!

[MikeStand]

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7252504.stm

Is it enough?

Average wages are £23,000

OMG we are well under avarage in this house

I'm a bit bemused by the average 273 minutes a day spent looking after children. Even if I only include my school age children I reckon I still spend 7 hours a day looking after them, not to mention on call all night too

and do you get more for doing two or more things at once? cooking tea while child clinging to your leg surely counts as childcare AND cooking?

and yes, on call rates at double or triple time

all up though we took the decision for me to stay at home as that's what we preferred so i'd never suggest i need a wage (not since i do all the finances anyway), and Dh would never suggest i be limited to one i guess in the form of an allowance?

lol at needmorecoffee; same here. DH would be able to sack me for negligence of my duties

I thought the married tax allowance had been resurrected? Mind you it isn't likely to be very much though.

Here in the US the said that it was more like $140 thousand dollars. My hospital had a contest to win it for SAHM moms when I was in labor with ds2, but I didn't win.

no1ErmaBombeckFan, are you german by any chance...or are her books translated into english?

Nope she was an American writer - me, I am a good mixture with a good dollop of German...

lol...had no idea....had in my mind that she was german....but then, maybe just one of those automatic assumptions as I only ever read her books in german (as my mum is a great fan...and she does write very well)

£30k isn't nearly enough. I worked out the cost of replacing a sahm with paid help and it came to about £150k a year iirc

However, I take Soapbox's point, spent this week with a friend who is a sahm with 2 children AT SCHOOL and she says she is very busy every day and doesn't sit down til 9pm every night. I pointed out that dh and I still have to do many of the same chores (cooking, shopping, although not cleaning, we have a cleaner, paying bills etc, all the boring crap) and we both work ft oth so have to fit them in around that.

the difference will be she is busy with things she has chosen to do no doubt. or the desperate need for structure and efficiency that is simply vital in a 2 x WOH household just isn't there?

i think 30k sounds too low.

Quite Bk. She did say she wondered if she wasn't working very efficiently and I said I agreed, she couldn't be using her time in the best way if she still wasn't sitting down til 9pm. Whereas 2 x ft wothps HAVE to be efficient, there simply isn't any time not to be if you want a fed/cleanish/alive family

ffs, housewife!lets all go back 50 years.

i work and clean the house and so does dh its our bloody house ... oh i can't be bothered with this nonsense.

OMG two kids at school all day and still not sitting down til 9 pm!! I agree WWW, going out to work just forces you to be more time efficient!

lol, probably cost about £25 a week to replace me

and the point of the survey was??????

can't understand why people get paid to come up with this sort of stuff tbh

im a single stay at home mum ds is only young so wants me playing with him etc but i can usually sit down just after 7 when he goes bed i do as much as i can during the day, sometimes to do it again 10 minutes later o the joys. I dont understand how shes not sitting down till 9 with 2 kids at school.

maybe she's one of those strange people who dust the skirting boards twice a day and clean behind the wahing machine daily?

If so, I'll have her to stay for a week, I've lost count of all the bits that have fallen behind the cooker

suspect a lot of that would be docked in our house too, I've lost count of the number of thimes DH has told me (iho) I do nothing around the house. yeah...that's why it looks the same as it did in the morning, imagine if I went on strike....